I had one of those terrible epiphanies as an entrepreneur last week. I realized I might have wasted eight months thinking about product fit instead of pitch fit… To be fair, I had never really given pitch fit a ton of scientific thought. One meeting changed all that.
I was with my head of Business Development at a coffee shop in downtown San Francisco. We were excited because we were meeting with Joe Sexton. Joe is currently an Executive in Residence at Greylock and Lightspeed, and was the former President of Worldwide Field Operations at AppDynamics. AppD is a stellar startup in Silicon Valley that has created an insane amount of value for clients and investors. Joe was an integral part in that.
The Problem
Joe entered the coffee shop, put on his therapist hat, and we started telling him how things were going at our start-up POPin. The company had made tremendous headway in the past six months with logo acquisition. We would show that the product could do many, many things and we would find an economic buyer in a department. They would begin using it and then we would get stuck. We were not getting introduced to other departments as we needed to be. We explained that for POPin, intros to other departments were vitally important because the product connects leaders to the trenches in a way that creates buy-in. To be a success we must penetrate as much of leadership as possible in all departments. We lacked adoption.
Joe asked to see our pitch. About ten minutes later my head was spinning. I had that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. I remember as we left the coffee shop that I grabbed my phone, went to the notes app and wrote the following note, “The doubt never goes away… There is so much you do not know.” I walked out feeling that if Joe was running POPin, we would be miles ahead of where I had been able to lead the company. His go-to-market skills were PhD level. His connections were incredible. All this, not to mention that he is annoyingly likable…
Pitch Fit Matters
Here is what happened. I showed Joe a presentation that explained what the product was. It is a crowdsourcing platform that works on mobile or web. We bragged about some logos we had and we then pulled it up on our phones to show him what it looked like and how it operated. He indulged us. After this, he seemed to understand what we were going after with the product and asked us “why” he would use it. I thought I had covered that in the beginning of the pitch, but he wanted to hear it again, apparently. I was not crisp. I was not crisp at all. I knew “why” there was a need for POPin, but I was not explaining it simply and if I as the CEO had trouble doing this, how could I scale a salesforce to do it? Joe explained that we were good at saying and showing what it was, but people bought the “why.”
We made two ppt slides right there.
- Slide 1: “We equip leaders to quickly implement decisions with the BUY-IN of the teams doing the work.”
- Slide 2: “Those doing the work always know the truth of the matter. It just isn’t safe for them to tell you.”
Joe told us how hard it is for leaders to get people to tell them the truth. In most orgs, telling the truth is career limiting. This is especially true with a manager that only manages up in the org. He asked me if I had any stories illustrating this. He was leading the witness... I had just released a book called “Management vs Employees” that told many stories of money wasted on initiatives and projects that the trenches knew would fail before they even launched. They knew they would fail and never said a word about it to leadership because it wasn’t safe to do so.
Joe smiled at me. We made that our third slide. We illustrated how surveys get answers but don’t create buy-in. POPin allows you to deep dive on topics anonymously and makes it safe for the trenches to tell you why something will or will not work. You then put those answers from the first POPin session right back on the same group and have them figure out how to solve for them. The result of lifting their voice and sharing the authorship for the solve: Buy-in.
After that slide we stopped. We had “WHY” and “How we are different/effective” covered. He then had us go through six to nine of the top use cases. We just listed them on one slide. A simple bullet list. Nothing fancy. He made sure we had different use cases that would appeal to different departments. A Product Launch use case for Product Dev. Deep Dive on Survey Results for HR. Skip Level for Execs. Agenda Setting and Project Pre-Mortems as a catch all. He asked if I could talk through each and I said I could.
BVA and BVR
We stopped and got a bit tactical. He explained to me the concept of a BVA. A business value assessment. He said a common mistake we make in sales is to rely too heavily on one key champion. In these four slides we had covered, why, how we are different, and where to start. But the use case slide was brilliant. No matter who we were talking to – be that CIO, CEO, Comms, HR, Ops, or CFO – when we talked about the use cases for the other departments, we could ask if they thought their counterparts would be interested. If the answer was yes, we could get the names and a warm introduction. This was the key concept of the BVA. We are looking to build a groundswell of support into a document we could then take to the economic buyer. By hooking multiple departments in at the start, we may slow the sales cycle a bit, but look at the safety it offered the campaign from unexpected turnover or a single department’s budget being tight. By documenting our pilots in a BVA format, it increased our credibility and reach within the account. It also set us up terrifically well for a BVR. A Business Value Realization.
In a BVR, we could take all the work from the BVA and come back six to 12 months later to measure ROI on the different use cases that were launched by our leaders who were fighting for buy-in with their teams. When he explained this, I stopped taking notes and looked at him. He smiled again. By proving real concrete value throughout the year with quarterly BVR meetings, we could almost guarantee we stay valuable (and used correctly) to our clients. This would ensure a renewal. We would also get leaders bragging internally about their BVR results, assisting with new department adoption. Genius.
What Happened to the Product?
Before he left, Joe made a very poignant point. He asked if in those four slides if we had ever showed the product? Of course the answer was no. He said to go and test the deck on ten customers. Talk to a BVA as we met new leaders, but specifically track how many in the first 30-minute meeting ask to actually SEE the product.
Since meeting Joe, my team has done a complete change up. We have a deck we can present in eight minutes or less that never shows the product. It is exactly as I have listed it above with the addition of more detailed use cases slides that the team can decide to use if needed. We usually stop on the “list of use cases” slide and let the client tell us where they see the most value. IN OVER 40 PRESENTATIONS, LESS THAN 20% OF THE PROSPECTIVE CLIENTS ASKED TO SEE THE PRODUCT! I was stunned. Intros to other leaders and pilots (many paid now) went through the roof.
In the last month with the new pitch we have received orders from nine new clients. Two of those clients ($44B and $14B in revenue) gave us an order for POPin in two weeks. We did not make a single change to the product features in that month. The sales cycle has dropped drastically. All we did was remove product from the pitch and focus on our purpose and value to a leader. I felt like such an idiot for not seeing it sooner.
In technology we are so enamored with our products. Joe taught me to turn that on its head. Talk about value and make it clear where to start. Then track that value on an ongoing basis. Simple and effective. Pitch fit is making all the difference.
