Workshop Wednesday: Ways to Align and Execute an Enterprise B2B Team Selling Motion For Repeatabl…

Hello.

Hello, everyone. Hello everyone. Welcome to Workshop Wednesday. Just gonna give everyone a few moments to get in here and get settled in. Great to see everyone back for another Workshop Wednesday. Thanks everyone so much for joining. Hello. Hello. As always, let us know where you're tuning in from. I am in Salt Lake City today, so would love to hear where everyone else is tuning in from as well. Drop it in the chat and we're gonna just get kicked off here in one moment. Brazil. Wow. Love when we have people from all over the world. Thanks so much for joining everyone. All right, well, welcome. We are thrilled to have everyone back for another episode of Workshop Wednesday. And today we are joined by Beau Borland, founder and CEO at playbill. Bo is going to be talking to us about how to align and execute Enterprise B2B team selling motions. Something that I know is on so many people's minds as they move up market. So really, really excited to hear his playbook. Hear a little bit more about how he's built things over at Play playbuilt and and all the lessons that he has to share with everyone. So as always, we're going to kick off with a couple of quick fire questions to get us settled and then I'll pass it over to Beau and we will have plenty of time for questions. So please everyone make sure to drop your questions into the chat and I will be in touch with you if you want to come off camera and ask that question live to Beau when it comes time in the next 20 minutes or so or if you would like for me to read it off. So we will go ahead and get kicked off with Bo though and Beau. We'd love to hear a lot of founders in the room as always, but love to hear you kind of just tell us what you're working on day to day. What's keeping you busy currently over at playbuilt.

Hi everyone. Thanks. Yeah, April, I've recently I was leading global teams at companies over the last decade and about a year ago I left to launch a company, playbuilt and that's been the focus for the last 12 months. We've got a team of folks from formerly from Salesforce and Mulesoft and we're building a solution. Learning, founder, led sales, doing a little bit of everything.

Thanks so much, Bo. I'm sure this is going to be a related question to that, but in the past 12 months, what's the hardest thing that you've been working on?

The hardest thing is time management. You know, we all wear lots of hats and startups. So it's figuring out what to work on, what to prioritize, ruthlessly prioritizing the work, developing different demand generation strategies, executing on those strategies, founder led sales, networking, attending events. It's just mainly prioritizing time and really figuring out what's the most pressing thing to work on at the moment.

Yeah great lead into some of your content. I have a lot of questions for you about your founder led sales and kind of that transition too when we get into it more but kind of a related question then with your busy schedule. What's the favorite your Currently your favorite SaaS tool that you're using?

I really like Descript. It's you don't have to be an expert and it helps you transcribe meetings. It also lets you create videos. So if you want to do short form videos on LinkedIn or Google, it helps you build a more professional looking video with interactivity captions and adding graphics. So it's a great tool. I highly recommend.

Oh Descript, great. Thanks so much. Love to hear the shout out for we're always looking for the best tools. Well Beau, with that I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to you. I'll be back for questions everyone as always make sure to be dropping your questions in the chat throughout and I'll make sure to be coordinating when we get to the time here in just a little bit. But Bo, take it away.

All right, thank you. I've already made the introduction so we'll just jump right in. My goal in this session is to give you an approach for repeatable success at every stage of growth and your company is in one of these four stages. Finding product market fit, moving from SMB to enterprise or vice versa achieving enterprise repeatability and lastly strategic expansion. And so over the last decade, leading global technical sales teams at Mulesoft and Salesforce and Pentaho. I've been fortunate to experience all four of these stages at three different companies. So for anyone on the call that has experienced stage 1 finding product market fit. What does that team typically look like? Like what functions are involved? Feel free to enter into the chat. I'm sure some of you are in this stage. What does that team look typically look like? And you know yes you you're typically going to have a marketing lead, a sales leader that's going to be the founder doing founder led sales. And of course you're have product product engineering, building the product. How about stage two? When your company moves from SMB to selling enterprise deals, what functions or roles are typically added to the mix. So here you're going to see some combination of pre sales, also known as solution or sales engineering or customer success and services and a more robust or expanded rev ops function. So that's stage two when you're moving from SMB to enterprise or maybe you've had success in enterprise and you're moving down market. And then how about stage three? Stage three is when the company has codified success in the enterprise and you're investing in repeatable growth. And so here a revenue enablement team is absolutely critical component for codifying success and using teaching methods to onboard and scale teams across your revenue functions. And then lastly stage four, strategic expansion is when companies are expanding globally, you're launching new products, you're acquiring other companies. And at this stage what I've seen and experienced is every functional leader gets replicated across other theaters such as Amer, Emea and jpac. The point is, is that irregardless of the stage you're in, success is about aligning go to market teams around a common goal of delivering repeatable customer value in a way that generates growth. So I like to say teaming is the new selling. As companies continue moving towards integrated go to market focused on revenue and with the shared goal of delivering repeatable customer value that generates growth, why is teaming the new selling? Because enterprise sales is a complex multi threaded beast. You know the days of the loan sales rep doing it all, creating demand, creating pipe, converting that pipe are long gone. Today as you know SaaS companies employ specialist roles working together to run revenue plays across customer acquisition, expansion and retention motions. So some examples of revenue plays are enterprise sales, launching new sales methodologies, account based marketing and sales upsell and cross sell industry vertical strategies, partner led sales. So we're doing that today with with some customers is is partner led sales. Many many shifts to consumption based pricing, launching new product lines, adding new motions like product led growth. So when I present this in person, I like to poll the audience to see who is executing these plays. So I won't be able to see all the hands in the audience but let's give it a try using the chat window. You can give a thumbs up in the chat if you're running at least one of these revenue plays. So. So I'm seeing some come in a plus one, a thumbs up. That's great. Yes. What about give another thumbs up if you're running three of these plays. Who's running at least three of these plays?

Yep.

And I'm still seeing thumbs up come through. How about five who's running five and more than five. So I'm still seeing several yeses come through. As you can see, just among our group B2B SaaS, sales is multi threaded and as your company grows, it's going to become more multi threaded. So let's drill down into the acquisition motion. Here's a simplified three stage view of acquiring new customers. Demand gen, as you know, is all about educating your target market on a problem to build trust and interest in your brand and your solution. And then pipegen focuses on attracting your target market with active buying intent into your pipeline. And then pipeline conversion is all of the solutioning and commercials involved to convert your pipeline into wins. Here's one problem when it comes to revenue plays, go to market teams over rotate on demand in pipegen and not enough go to market innovation is focused on pipeline conversion strategies. They simply fail to consider the full cycle revenue play. This is especially true for go to market with complex solutions where the actions required to win enterprise deals includes things like you see here. So question for the audience, are you seeing these types of actions in your deals? Think about the higher expectations in selling into the enterprise, the larger buying committees, multi threading, tailoring in the positioning, sizing and performance proving out multiple integrations, etc. So what I see teams, what I see account teams is a lack of intentionality and as a result they're led by the customer and they reactively invest thousands of hours into these actions within a single account without ever distilling all of that work into a coherent and compelling buying vision that you see there at the bottom. Crafting a buying vision. Why is that important? According to Forrester Research, 74% of executive buyers pick the company that helps them create the buying vision. So in other words, they choose a company that helps them see the need to do something different. And only 20% say they choose a winner from a fair bake off. So the buying vision is a framework of tailored value messages that emerge over the course of the sales cycle. They're designed to go viral inside the customer's organization and drive uniqueness, not only uniqueness, but urgency into that conversation. So I believe this form of buyer enablement is table stakes in SaaS today. In the world of SaaS, when the vast majority of deals are lost to no decision. If you look in your CRM today, the vast majority of those deals are going to be lost to no decision. And there's recent research from the book the Jolt Effect and they found a surprising statistic from a large data set. They found that 56% of those deals are not lost to status quo, but instead they're lost to customer indecision. So buyers are not enabled and confident enough to pull the trigger on your solution. The decision risk is too high. So what can you do to change this? Okay, so we start with this nine box periodic table that you see here. I created this to take into account the full cycle of elements needed to craft this tailored buying vision. It starts with recognizing that you have three levers for persuading your customer. Your position, your perspective, and your proof. And you'll need to persuade this buying committee on the three columns that you see there. Why change? Why you and why? By now you've probably seen those three columns before. So combining these two things, if we look in the top left box, the most basic positioning around why change your. Your position starts from a place of empathy and deep understanding of your buyer's pains and needs. So you see pain points there is the first element. And then next your perspective on why change. This is these are your insights and expertise in the form of thought leadership about how you can help them accomplish something. And your proof can be delivered through initially customer stories. So at this stage, if a buyer is engaged, they're sharing information, they're leaning into your sales cycle. We would move to the second column. And your position is to directly address key differentiators and why your solution is the best. The customer wants to hear this from you. You've got a point of view. They want to know how you're different. And for number five, at this point, you've learned enough about your prospect to deliver a very informed perspective with tailored demos about how your demo is uniquely able to deliver their specific use cases. So if that goes well, you can move to number six. Does anybody on the call want to comment on what can be used as proof for box number six? I think I've seen some things come through, some good suggestions, workshops. So that's one of the things that I see is workshops and pilots. Absolutely. It's the pilot program. It goes by many names, poc, trial, whatever that is, that is your proof. And so if you can get through that, the next column that we look at is your position is informed enough to really craft highly tailored value propositions. These are unique to each prospect. Obviously they come from your value propositions, but you can phrase these in a way where they uniquely address your customers, their objectives, their use cases, their needs, and their pains. And your perspective includes relevant data. What do I mean by relevant data? So, for example, you might have data come from an ROI exercise or the successful results of the pilot can be read out in presentation form to the decision making committee. And so that's what we mean by relevant data, things like ROI results, pilot results, and to close out the 9 box, any form of special offer can be used to drive urgency into why now? Why buy now? So in summary, these nine elements come together. They come together to form your point of view, inform this buying vision, which will help you box out the competition and close more of those deals that previously would have been lost to customer indecision. That 56% that we see there in the, in the chart. All right, so those elements can be placed within the context of the full funnel funnel buyer's journey. The journey covers the three phases that you see here. Discovery, evaluation, selection. And you can see that the buyer actions are plotted against the sales cycle duration on the X axis, which could be anywhere from 6 to 18 months for different enterprise buying cycles. And then time and complexity, the amount of time and investment from the vendor and the customer on the Y axis. As we overlay the nine box on the buyer's journey, it's important to recognize that the most intense and focused customer engagement occurs during the evaluation stage. This is actually where the real magic happens. It's through these critical selling actions that these multiple aha moments are created. So think of aha moments as inflection points. They determine whether the deal is won or lost. And aha moments are when I like to think of it as when the buyer's emotions are triggered, their eyes dilate and they start to envision a better future with your solution. So these aha moments are clearly turning points when the prospect morphs from a skeptical buyer to a vendor co conspirator, helping you to win over the buying committee. Yet it's all, it's really common. I see go to market teams launch new products into the market without considering the full cycle revenue play for engineering these critical aha moments. So let's take a look at how you can construct full cycle start to construct full cycle revenue plays. It starts by mapping the nine box to the buyer's journey and any relevant team roles. You'll need to define the business objectives for the revenue play. What are we trying to achieve with this play? And is it acquisition, Is it expansion, Is it retention? You'll need to collaborate with subject matter experts in the field, your AES, your SEs, customer success to really define what is the gold standard that we're striving to achieve with this play. How, how can we not only create a great customer experience, but also a great employee experience. So the key questions that you want to ask the team are what roles, actions, narratives, assets and enablement are going to be needed to put this together. These are the essential building blocks for your revenue play. And now the job is basically to create your inventory of revenue play building blocks. It starts by aligning on the outcomes your team is striving to achieve at each stage. For example, in the discovery phase, one of the shared outcomes could be identify and qualify the buyer's use case and tech stack. And you also want to define input and output metrics that are needed to measure the health of this deal and their performance at each stage. So an input metric could be the number of demos that we did. An output metric could be the conversion out of that stage. So input and output metrics help inform the health of these deals. Within each swim lane, it comes down to defining a set of actions to prescribe best practices. These are well defined discrete actions that serve as a common language to ensure everybody speak in the same play page. Examples could be position, solution, value, demo solution, perform, pilot, etc. And then you have assets that attach to those actions that enable the team on how to perform the prescribed action. So for example, a first call deck, a demo script, workshop in a box. At this point, you know you're starting to build out these building blocks, inform these plays and you it basically this is the main approach. It's, this is a rinse and repeat approach for aligning go to market functions, instilling intentionality in the teams, gaining agreement on what is the gold standard that we're striving to achieve for not only winning more deals, but also creating a great customer experience and a great employee experience. So that's the, that's the basics of the 101 of the approach. You might be wondering so how does my company fit into the equation of building and executing revenue plays? The great thing is, is that this can be applied to SaaS companies at any stage. As you, as you go through and look at the, the finding product market fit stage, what does that look like? Well, your ICP, you may still be validating your ICP. You may have multiple ICPs and iterating on what is our primary ICP to focus on. Your playbook is founder led. You're not really running a lot of plays. You're focused on net new acquisition and you're doing many iterations. So you're iterating constantly to find what works and codify that. And your Seller type, whether it's founder led sales or you've hired your first sales rep, should be very entrepreneurial, a lot of changes, lots of different hats to wear. So you want to have a very entrepreneurial seller in that case. Now as you get into repeatability for scale, you're really niching down on your targeted ICP and your playbooks start to become function led. You're going to have leaders in specific functions in sales, customer success that are going to bring their own playbook to the table to incorporate ladder up into your core company playbook. You'll be running multiple plays, fewer iterations and your sellers are very solution centric, especially in the complex sale. And then lastly at strategic expansion stage, you may be expanding your icp. I've experienced this with Mulesoft, you know, acquired an RC RC RPA tool and we started selling to a new buyer. We're expanding our icp, we're hiring distributed leaders. Those distributed leaders are coming in with their own plays in in different markets globally. And you're running many, many plays, multiple iterations and you start to see that your sellers become more specialized as you, as you grow bigger and you have a bigger product portfolio to sell. So this is a key here, is that the takeaway is that these revenue plays are not set in stone. You're going to continue to evolve, iterate and improve these as you talk to customers, you launch new features, you get new customer objections, new corner use cases. Each of these things will emerge each quarter from the field and you should be incorporating that back into the next iteration of your revenue plays. So some key takeaways here. Let's do a quick recap of what we covered and then I'll open it up for questions. The the goal here was to give you an approach, a repeatable rinse and repeat approach to create success at any company growth stage. And the focus that we really drilled into was pipeline conversion revenue play for net new B2B customer acquisition motion in the enterprise. And that approach starts with teaming mindset around a common goal. Using the nine box to create aha moments and use that as a rubric to craft your buying vision. Mapping that nine box to your buyer journey and your team roles, translating that into a set of building blocks and then using those building blocks to assemble your revenue plays. And then lastly build and manage revenue plays like agile software. I like to say the the effectiveness of your revenue play is proportional to the number of meaningful iterations. So always be improving, always be iterating. So hopefully that approach that I've Outlined here is something that you can take away at any stage of growth and start to codify what success looks like for your target buyer, your target market in your company. All right, April, I'll stop there and we can take some questions.

Thanks so much, Beau. Yeah, already getting a few questions. We have a couple from LinkedIn too. But first up, Ryan, sounds like you have a question, so I will let Ryan jump in and ask it live.

Hi. Thanks, April or Taylor. Yeah. So we have. We're probably in what you would describe as your phase two. We have three enterprise contracts that are just now launching, so we still need to prove out the repeatability factor. But we had nine paid trials that provided an insane amount of feedback to the point where we now have tailored pitches that have CFO level pain points in them that we can actually put real world numbers of what they're losing in money if they don't use our software. And so we're in a good spot. We have a VP of sales coming on in March. I'm a horrible VP of sales. I failed three or four times with SDRs in the last two years. That's why we're bringing somebody on. Per Jason's often advice. I don't want to have this guy coming in with nothing. Like, I'm doing this all lone wolf style. I was fortunate that I came from the market that we chased. So I know the people we're talking to, I speak their languages. But we've been lucky that we got the enterprise contracts. But I want to start doing your approach. So steps here. I want to. I built out the Personas, like, if I'm hiring a VP of sales, what's the best thing I can do for him to be prepared when he comes on and, and not ask him to do everything you've shown us here today from scratch.

Yeah.

Thanks, Ryan. It sounds like it's great that you've already had some success and you're starting to think about codifying what you've learned from, from that success. And that's the key, really. And I like the nine box approach because it gives you a, a full view of what your seller is going to experience once they get out there and start trying to sell and you know, each of those components starts with just trying to define that. And a good starting place is the company website. Your marketing team probably has done a pretty good job already of defining key value propositions. So I always start with the company website. If the company website doesn't. Doesn't serve as a, a useful way to understand the icp, the core value propositions, any segmentation your business, then that's an opportunity to make improvements to the website. So I'd start with the website. I'd also take your learnings, your notes from those experiences and start to try to codify that in a structured approach. Looking at the nine box like try to fill out each of those things, take a first pass at it and then documenting those things is just the first step. You can't just hand over a document to someone and expect them to read it and then be able to execute on it. It's about a lot of it is about the narratives and the assets that they have available. So what is the narrative to for example, after a demo, if you want to be the call to action to be to get them into a workshop, how do we position that workshop? What's the narrative around that? The benefits for the customer. And so I don't know if that answered your question, but I think that's a good way to start. You're already well on your way with. With those successes and what you're already documenting.

Sounds good.

Maybe. Maybe Bo is Jason. I could add one thought to Ryan's question. You've got a new VP of sales come in. You've got nothing for her or him.

Right?

But some customers is a question. I agree all this nine box is good in the website, but I could simplify it into one thing. A new head of sales can really benefit from having all the collateral built for them. Okay. This is something that founders and others think is simple.

Right.

But the ability to have a simplified summary of the offering, to have the part of the webpage that describes it. If you have anything like a prospectus or anything, whatever type of collateral. Right. Demo, tear sheet, takeaway, a demo. You can email a loom, whatever it is. Right. Loom case. Whether it's a packet of case studies going to bo, I'll give them a packet of case studies, a loom. Make sure there is a landing page they can drive folks to. Even better, do a weekly webinar for them every week that they can drive prospects to so you can give them automated air cover. It's just anything you can think of that you think you can just tell people because you know your product works. I find the new head of sales just struggles with anything in the area of collateral. Right. So if you do nothing else, arm them with those tools so they don't have to sit there scrambling to try to do the first deck. Give them the first deck. Right. Make sure they have A sales deck they're comfortable with. And then sit down with her or him and iterate the deck so that they like the deck you do and you can incorporate the way they sell. And so now they've got a deck. Right. And now they've got a tear sheet with case studies. And now they've got a loom. And now they've got a webinar, like just check, check, check, check, so that they're not scrambling to do something. Salespeople, typically marketers are better at this stuff, but salespeople are. I give them a C minus in terms, but they will. The problem is they'll go out and do it. Like they'll build the world's worst deck with the worst graphics and the fonts will spill out over the side of the screen and they'll try to do the case studies, but they'll be littered with typos and they'll sort of understand the market, but they won't, you know, so if you just arm them with the basics, then they can like build on top of it.

Yeah. And think about those assets in terms of internal assets and external assets. So you can bifurcate based on internal or external. And internal is. Is the sheets they're going to use the competitive battle card, for example, internally. But the external assets are going to be things that they actually share or show to the customer.

Yeah, I mean, we spent two years building this master site that design engineers were supposed to use. And where we've landed is this custom OEM product that we bring in and build from scratch with a template. And so everything that's on the website, they couldn't send. We don't even use the website today as a marketing tool. We are literally direct sales pitch decks. And the pitch decks are completely dialed in. The website would be where we're actually lacking because none of our clients find us on our website. So that's. Thank you all. That's good. Appreciate it.

Hey, Bo, you want to turn your screen share off too, just so you can see a few more faces as well. A lot of questions we're getting in the chat. People would love to hear some more specific examples of kind of specifically on. On your slide 10 where you go through your continuous revenue play, iteration, improvement. Like, how do you define good in each of those stages?

Yeah, let me see here. So how do you define good? Well, I mean, a lot of that comes from your best sellers. What are they doing? Capturing those feedback loops from the field. What are they doing? What techniques are they doing? That is really Good in discovery. You know, start with discovery. How are those meetings going? What are those conversations like? And then as you move to the next step, what does great solutioning look like? What does it, what does it mean to show up to this meeting and have the customer leave the meeting fired up to go to the next step? So look at the conversions by different stages and talk to your ses, talk to your sales folks that are having success and work to codify those techniques into the first version of your play and then iterate over it. So that's what I've, I've seen. When I was with Mulesoft, I was leading a team of 525 sellers. So a very technical platform. SEs were doing a lot of the selling from beginning to end and everybody was doing something similar but different in different geographies. And so just getting out there and understanding finding those patterns and then consolidating everybody on a common language is a huge benefit. You can, if you consolidate everybody on a common set of actions, a common set of assets, a common language, everyone starts speaking the same language, you can communicate better and faster. Your metrics are going to aggregate up to the right level of input and output metrics because you've standardized on a common set of actions. And you know there's a huge benefit into just consolidating the slight variations of what people are doing into your gold standard. It's basically your happy path. Right? We all know sales cycles are non linear. And what we're trying to do is create a success framework that people strive for while recognizing that we need to allow for creativity in the sales cycle. We're not blindly following a process. What we're doing is we're laying down the groundwork for what great looks like and then recognizing that you're going to need flexibility and variability in different geographies. How you sell to a bank in London is going to be different than how you sell to the U.S. government. And so you want to come up with a framework and then train and educate folks that they don't blindly follow this. This is the gold standard that we want to get, we want to give you. And then you work to have innovation and the ability to have flexibility within this framework.

Great. A question kind of somewhat about the pilots. This is going back to your, your point about the pilot programs. Toby from LinkedIn is asking, when you're in a complex and lengthy pilot, what role do you let behavior change play? When we change business processes, we're asking people to change their behaviors, want them to Use your new process. You realize you must need a behavioralist approach as opposed to forcing more work on the managers of your customers.

Yeah, that's a great question. So I'll go back to my MuleSoft experience. MuleSoft was very much a challenger sell. We were convincing IT departments to move away from point to point integration, brittle point to point integration inflexible, traditional ETL and move to API led. So that was an architectural reframe. And if you find yourself in a PoC where the customer is just now learning that they're going to have to do a major change in behavior and how they approach things in the PoC, then you probably shouldn't have been doing that PoC. You've got to set that expectation from the very beginning. And that, you know, a challenger approach works really well. You have a unique insight into how something should be done. You need to change the behavior of how it delivers projects in a more agile way. So if you're not setting the stage with that from the very beginning, from the first call deck to share that new insight, to share this new approach, by the time you get to the POC and they see how hard and how much is going to have to change, it's going to fail every time. So really I go back to the full funnel revenue play and this is where go to market teams fail a lot of times is they don't consider the full funnel, they don't consider the poc. How are we going to instrument the POC plan in a way that's going to let us set landmines for our approach and our competition on this big behavioral change. If we haven't set those expectations early, we're, we're setting ourselves up to fail in the PoC. So I go back to thinking across the full funnel of what is your approach? Is it challenger? Are you asking customers to change the way they do things? Today everybody in the company needs to be speaking that language. So we had every employee that got hired, not just salespeople, had to go through certification for the architecture reframe. It didn't matter if you were in accounting, marketing, sales, you had to learn how to reframe the customer from point to point integration to API LED integration. That's not an easy certification. But every, every new employee had to do it. And I would suggest making sure that you've got that built into the full funnel versus just at the POC level. Did that answer it or do you want to add something to.

I think that answered it. That was a question from Someone tuning in on LinkedIn so they're not live with us in the room. But I think that that covered the question. So thanks so much Beau. We have Holly with us here in the room and she has a question following up on that PoC point. Thanks Beau. I really appreciate it. Curious for PoC, do we pay for the PoC? Should prospects pay for the PoC, the implementation or should they pay for, let's say a full year of the revenue over the out clause if the POC doesn't work out?

I haven't had success having customers pay for the POC unless we've scoped it to a level where it requires services to get involved. So what I mean by that is you typically want to scope the POC for something that your existing team like your sales engineer can deliver in a feasible time frame that will support your, your, your LTV to CAC ratio. So your customer acquisition costs, you've got to factor in that Now a lot of see a lot of pre sales teams where they'll execute a four week, six week poc. The AE will push them to just do whatever it takes and that can get really expensive. So what I like to do is, is scope a free pilot. Assuming you've got the resources to support that pilot, that might mean two day pilot, a three day pilot, maybe a five day pilot, anything beyond five days. That takes your team to prove out use cases, you get into paid territory and you can give the customer options. They like to have options. You could say hey, we can prove your use cases in a five day POC for free. However, when we looked at your requirements document, you had a lot of redundant use cases in there. You're asking us to do this, this, you're asking us to do performance testing and based on the resources that we're going to need to execute that, it's going to be two to three weeks. And so we're going to ask that you put some skin in the game. We'll fund the first week and you pitch in on week two and three. That's a good way to give the customer the option as to which choice they want to take. The free route or the more extended services route.

Awesome. Thank you. Thanks everyone. But I have a question for you. Obviously very different world coming from Mulesoft and Salesforce. So just curious, what does the go to market team look like right now at Playbill?

So we've got myself Mega Leary is on the call. She's our head of growth and is very much founder led sales. We also have Another person on my team at mulesoft that is our co founder and engineering leader and so we leverage advisors. I'm pretty creative and I mentioned Descript earlier. It's just you've got to be in a startup, everyone's gotta be producing content and so you've gotta learn new tools and you know demand gen is all about especially in with something like playbuild is informing. You're evangelizing an approach and you're evangelizing a new way of doing things and that takes time and so you really need to be creating content. I'm a big fan of LinkedIn. Putting your point of view out there, building trust in the brand, building trust in you as a founder and then and then scaling off of that.

Great. Would love. And again a lot of founders in the room so would love to hear kind of how are you, how do you split your time for across all these different go to market and all the different elements that you outlined at the beginning. Right. Of all those different sales motions, how are you kind of splitting your time across on a day to day?

I spend a large amount of time creating that thought leadership. So very early on we were building product and creating thought leadership and starting to form our point of view. And there's a, there's a framework to that. So you want to have a strategy with your content. You just don't want to push quantity, you want to really push quality, but in a strategic way. And so I've spent a lot of time early on building that foundation of thought leadership as the product was being built and we weren't ready for the product yet to really push the product. So now that we're getting the product there, we're shifting from thought leadership content to more direct outbound, outbound sales and continuing to push content. But maybe not as big a piece as fewer large LinkedIn articles, but more short form pieces from that. So I spend I'd say about half my time and still content generation and then the other half in customer meetings and founder led sales.

Great. We still have a few more minutes with Bo. Any other questions here, feel free to drop them in. Bo, I think a few people are asking for some more specific examples that you may have of kind of walking through the framework. If you maybe want to use a MuleSoft example to dive a little bit deeper into some of those points.

Sure. Maybe Taylor, like the nine box.

Yep. I think it was related to the nine box. I think that was what we had Elizabeth in the chat asking about that.

Okay, sure. So the first column of the nine box was Y change. And so if I put myself in the mulesoft experience, my position was that there's pain in the market. Companies are not moving fast enough. They're not able to, there's Hundreds, thousands of SaaS products within these companies and integrating that data is really difficult with point to point. So we, we start to identify pain points and then the thought leadership comes in around architecture and why API led, why APIs are better than point to point and how that's going to benefit you. And of course customer stories. We had a lot of customer stories in various industries. We were a horizontal platform so we could, we could pick from different customer stories that would talk about how company a went from point to point integration across thousands of SaaS applications and move to an API led approach, say bank of America as an example. And the benefits and how they're able to move much faster. That's all just why change? Why should you consider a platform around API management and API led? And then that's not, that's not necessarily selling and comparing features and benefits. That's just really setting the stage around awareness for your brand, an understanding of the pain points and the potential benefits and then you get into the next stage. Which is why you key differentiators. Certainly at this stage, like I mentioned earlier, customers want to know if I'm buying a solution. They want to know how you're different and you can do that in a positive way. You never, you never want to be dishonest, you always want to be honest. And basically you're just highlighting your benefits compared to, compared to your competitors and the ones that are relevant specifically for that customer. Not just the cookie cutter benefits, but what do you know about that, that company, their initiatives, their use cases that you can tie to, to really emphasize your strengths. That's a few examples in yu. That middle column is really where most of the selling happens. That's the hand to hand combat when you're in there presenting your solution, doing pilots demos are really important. Not cookie cutter can demos, but tailored demos with a really good SE that knows how to weave a story around the customer's use cases. That's where most of the action is happening. And as, as I mentioned earlier, that's where the aha moments happen. Those are the inflection points in these deals. So you really need to develop plays with a mind of what the team is going through in that middle stage and what you're going to need to arm them with. What type of can demos, what do we want to propose as a pilot program, a free program. So I think I'll stop there. I could go through the whole thing, but hopefully that gives you a little bit better set of examples for each of those boxes.

Thanks, Bo. Massimo, it looks like you have one more question to probably close us out.

Hey, thanks Taylor.

Sure.

Bose, I'd love to hear your point of view or your suggestions in terms of removing obstacles in a bottom up sales approach. So when the product is really product led, right, you go in with a large amount of signups at the bottom of the organization and then you're trying to go, go up the ladder and try to sign a bigger deal. In your experience, what works best to remove those obstacles?

I'll just think off the top of my head if I go back to understanding the different Personas and who's using this and why are they using it. And then your goal is to build a bridge from where they are today to a larger team account, a larger paid, a paid account. So it's really focusing on why, understanding that person, how it's helping them, what are they getting out of that solution. So potentially even interviewing some of these, these users, why did they come to you? To, to your, how did they come to your product? How. What are they using it for? Are you finding patterns in different use cases and different Personas or is it just completely random? And what you'll find there is if you can find certain patterns, you can start to emphasize those use cases and, and build that bridge. So the build, build the building of the bridge from an individual user getting benefits to a team account. For me, it's all about talking about those use cases and how, you know, go back to the customer stories. What did, why did customer a go from an individual user to a team account and what benefits did they get from it? And then doing targeted, targeted outreach to those users at the appropriate times. That's one, one thing that comes to mind. I can't think of anything else right now, but hopefully that's, that's helpful. I always fall back to if you're thinking about, if you're innovating on strategies and trying to figure out what's going to move the needle. Always talk to your customers. So try to get in front of those customers, talk to them and really understand them and that helps inform your strategy for how you're going to get them from, you know, that individual account to a more expanded enterprise deal.

I don't know if we still have a minute, but I was referring more to like the fear of oh My gosh, it's legal. Is going to hear about this. They're going to shut this down. Right. Or the security team, like all of those obstacles that create a sort of a fact, like don't, don't let anybody know about this.

Okay, so you're saying that the cost. You're worried that if you've got a user today and then if you engage them in a, in a cycle, that their legal team might get wind of it and start to shut it down.

Right. Literally we have customers where there is hundreds of individual users or small teams and they're trying to not let anybody else higher up. No, because they're fear of. Okay, they're going to shut this down.

And are these paid users or free users or both?

Combo of both. Combo of both, yeah.

Okay. You know, you know, anything that's always made me nervous or scared in a sales cycle, let's say security reviews, you know, you don't want to, you don't want security to get wind of this or them to get involved in the sales cycle because they're gonna put you through the ringer and you know you're gonna have to get all these certifications. I've always favored taking those challenges or those fears head on. So how could you address that? You know, it's going to happen eventually they're going to find out. So how could you proactively position that as a benefit to your company, your solution, versus, you know, something that's going to slow it down? So, for example, one thing that we did before was we knew that we were going through more extensive SOC compliance reviews and CISOs were getting involved in sales cycles. So we just flipped it instead of avoiding the discussion. And when you avoid it, it would always show up late in the sales cycle, so they end up at the contract stage and kill the deal. But if we proactively addressed it early on, we took it head on and we said, we're not scared of, of this and we're going to address this. And here's how we address security. And you know, it's either going to work or it's going to identify some gaps in your platform that you can take back and say, look, we need to get this, this certification to be able to, to close these deals. So addressing it head on early on, taking it off the table versus waiting for the customer to bring it up as a potential objection has always benefited me in complex selling. So I would just try to try to take those head on and try to address them.

David, I think you may have A question to dive a little bit deeper into special offers if you want to come off mute.

Yeah, thanks.

Appreciate it.

You know, just one of the things.

That'S been coming up lately is I've been chatting with Stephen Forth from Ibica about pricing and discounting. There's some, a lot of talk at Sastor as well. Just wondering about your thoughts related to a new or unique product using discounts.

Versus maybe, maybe you have other thoughts.

Around special offers not being financial discounts. Just what you're seeing from a trend or thoughts around that lately would be very helpful.

Sure. Well, it's been a while since I've been a sales rep so I, you know, the, the pricing conversations, at least the last 10 years of my career I was not involved in those. So I'm not an expert on talking about that. But I will say that special offers absolutely could be something outside of discounting. So think about the conversation earlier about paid pilots. You know, maybe you package up and you have a paid pilot revenue play for one quarter. You're going to run this play where you're going to offer very specific use cases. You're going to build out integrations to some of your partners that you wouldn't normally do in a poc. So if you're going after a target market that's heavy SAP users, maybe you build a revenue play for Q1 that is, you know, SAP integration, free offer and you try it out. Another example could be add on products. You could, you can offer add on products where it looks like it's free but maybe it's baked into the price and you just, you know, you discount it down. So it's bundling. You can run bundling plays any type of time bound play where you want to work with marketing, put together a special offer, run that play and see if it moves the needle. Doesn't have to be discounting. There's a lot of creative ways. Another could be attending a workshop meeting with thought leadership that you've brought in so they get an invite to that meeting. There's, there's number of plays that you can do that to move the needle and those are just a few examples.

Great. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Sure.

The question, David. Well, as always everyone, thank you so much for joining. That's a wrap on this week's workshop Wednesday. We are back next week 10:00am Pacific Time. As always, back in this zoom room and we will be joined by Laura Cannell, partner at Atomico. She's going to be talking about kind of a carry on of some of the things that Beau touched on today, but talking about the move from founder led sales and beyond. So know it's a hot topic that everyone's really interested in hearing some more investor perspectives on. So please join us right here next week with Laura. And as always, you can find the slides on SlideShare and also on the Saster YouTube. So we will see you guys next week. And thanks so much again for another great workshop Wednesday. Thanks Beau for joining.

Thank you Taylor. Bye bye everyone.

Bye everyone.