The long game | Laura Meyer

And then the long game. How are we on time? Anyone got time? 11:04. 11:04. Cool. Perfect. We're good. The long game. How many of you guys— let me stop a minute because I'm talking way too much. How many of you actually tried to pitch a company to someone or tried to even pitch yourself to someone? Have you guys all at least done that? Yeah. Good, good, good. Good. So how frustrating is it, I mean, when you're not hearing anything back? I literally used to go through full paranoia. Am I awful? Am I not good enough? And there's something to be said, this doesn't relate to everybody, about being a female in tech and selling technology. And the reason I bring that up is because I sell to all men. And I always felt the need to really prove myself and drop all these technical terms and do all these things. It's not anything about you. People ignore emails all the time, and that's why I do that backup. So you don't have to second-guess yourself. If you're not hearing back, it's 'cause they're busy. They're busy or they're not interested. And it's really straightforward. The faster you take out the emotion from what you're selling or what you're doing, your product, your baby that you've built, the better off you'll be and the happier you'll be in this process because it's just— A long marathon game. There's a technology gap. This is a tough one because maybe in your case, you don't have anything to solve for it. You might not be able to build. You might not have a team of people to quickly add something. And that's going to be a decision you'll have to deal with. Do you decide to go for it and even Even if you— unless you have something in writing, there's no guarantee. So you could even go add this to your roadmap and then they could pivot and not choose you anyway. So there's a big decision and that's what your advisors are there for. That's what your technical architects or your developers, that's what everyone's there for to help make those decisions. But they are tough and they're something you'll have to do. They want to do a POC, POT, RFP. These are so horrible. They're horrible sometimes because they are hard. They are details, and you're investing everything to be successful, to prove out that you're the best, your technology is the best. And like you said, you all had questions about how we compare to our competitors. And it's tough. We really have to prove ourselves out without giving away all the secret sauce. And that's one of the challenges. But it's really fun to go through because it teaches you a lot. And there are— one of the best learning I've received is actually from the customer because they're telling you in those scenarios. That's when you're at the table. That's when you're learning from them at the same time what they need, what they don't like about your product, what they do like. And good. Any good stories surrounding that? I'm trying to think of one. I'm sorry, this is very non-story-filled because I can't share a lot. But there is a— let's see here. So a POC might be the scenario where we want to show off what we're doing with Watson. APIs, and so I might set up where we do a hackathon day or demo day where they could come in and build on our APIs and we'd work together with them. And so that is a very small scenario. A large POC could take a couple weeks. In machine learning, it could be 7 weeks. If we're trying to crawl their data, it's intensive and it's probably 24/7, and so the way we do it, we have people that I work with across— I might have someone, a product manager like Alyssa, help me manage it all, and then I have people that are consultants that are— some of them are local, some of them are India, helping us build this out. The good thing about being in a company like IBM is you have access to that, but you'd want a team to help you get through that because there's just no way You need a team. You need a team for a POC and to build everything. I think that's something you get it and you get the information and then you run with it. Unfortunately, I can't go into really good juicy details on those. They don't want to rip and replace. This is tough. You have this amazing platform. You have this and they only want a piece of it. You really have to think that through. All tough advisors and questions and things that you would do as a team, but sometimes you don't have access to that. And when this comes up, I think it's a product decision. Do you wanna take a portion of that to let them adopt, or do you— And this happens all the time. I see this all the time because companies have built their own proprietary systems. They've built their own CRM, ERP, all these products that run their back office. There's a lot of opportunity to help them improve that, but they already have it built, and they're not going to throw out their legacy systems. Not invented here. This is hard. This is a really hard one because a lot of companies just want to either acquire it. There's a reason why they're acquiring all those companies. They want to be able to say they've built it themselves. There's a reason why you don't see see necessarily partnerships powered by someone's AI technology right now because there's a lot of judgment, there's a lot of just junk thrown at Apple right now to where they're standing in the AI race and how they're competing with everyone. And you don't know what's going on behind the scenes. That's the issue with that whole type of conversation. And so that's something, um, I compete with Siri and their machine learning team. So anything I want to Excel and have a big win in Watson, that's who I'm going up against. Cloud versus on-prem. So this is the issue and why people would go with Watson. And so Alyssa already highlighted this, but if you don't have dedicated scenarios and you're taking corporate data, as you can imagine, a large enterprise like an IBM, Google, any of these large companies are getting the amount of security threats are astronomical that they're protecting against so their data doesn't get stolen or nothing happens to their systems. So for them to hand over any amount of data or to work in your environment, that's a huge problem. And it's much easier, clearly some of these companies are much more open to doing, bringing in SaaS and other things, but a lot of them aren't. And so that's something to consider if you're going to enterprise, to B2B. Silos and politics. This is a fun story I can share. And this happens at all companies. I got my hand slapped. I was really excited to reach out to this executive and really pumped about it. It was a great opportunity. I thought I had this great use case, this great person to come in, and I created a whole nightmare effect. for the people underneath. And so I'd been working with someone underneath this person. And not everyone's aware of the projects you're working on. Not everyone in a company, and especially a really secretive company and a company that works in silos, they don't have that conversation across. So I totally created this ripple effect of, what are you working on with IBM? What's going on? And we just had had some meetings. We hadn't even been working on anything. And it just I'm lucky it pivoted, but those type of things are something you have to think about because you don't know what you're walking into. And so my technical guy always says, my right hand can't speak to my left hand because I'm in an NDA here and an NDA here, and I can't talk to myself. And why that's funny is because you can't be sharing everything you're doing. And while that normally would be a really good thing to give yourself credibility. That's not always the case at a lot of companies. The NDA. The NDA is really important. Right. And it's so exciting, especially if you're running a company and you're getting these meetings and doing these things. But a lot of times you're reading about the leaks right now, and there are a ton of leaks, and they're caused by vendors usually or suppliers because a lot of companies have You'll be fired if you would leak something to the press or a blogger or anything like that. But if you would get that chance, I just have to say don't burn it. I've seen people be let go about things internally at IBM and rightly so because of the damage it does to a business and their long-term goals and their announcement cycles and the way they want to do things. It's just really important. And then security. How do you have the security conversation with a large company? That's really hard. I have security specialists for that, and that makes it 10 times easier, but the best thing you could do is make sure that you have those answers ready, 'cause they'll ask them. They'll want to know how their data's secured, how users are secured, who's using it, all these types of things, and all of a sudden you'll be knee-deep into to these questions unless you've already thought them through before presenting them.