Speakers

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Panel members: Ravi Khatod (Ambient Security), Nickhil Jakatdar (GenePath Diagnostics) and Aditya Kothadiya (Avoma)

Session Managers: Vartika Bansal & Hemanth Asher

Discussion

  1. Relevance: How did you validate your early hypothesis with the help of customers?
    1. Aditya: They could not trust an AI to understand and take the right notes. They set up interns to take notes and realized humans had better quality notes than any AI. They were competing with Gong, they focused on SMB industry. They listed it on the app store and started getting discovered through this inbound motion. Smaller customers grew to take up the highest number of seats eventually. Identify which customers have your particular pain point vs building for their specific requirements.
    2. Swapnil: They related strongly with the problem statement. Started off with a free trial for a small set of founders who faced the same issue. Figure out those first few customers and build for them.
    3. Nickhil: Define the problem well by interviewing customers. Hence finding the first few design partners is essential - they will help you understand the specifics, shape your problem statement and guide your product roadmap.
    4. Ravi: In enterprise, they use technology to solve a business problem. They realized they weren't solving a mainstream problem when they realized they couldn't find the second, third customer. Figure out what's the most consistent use case or vertical about your customers. Find someone who is willing to work with you. Think about what business problem are they solving? How are they solving it today? What value are you bringing them by solving the problem? Why are they picking you to solve this problem? Come through for them, honour your commitment.
  2. Acquisition: How did you reach out to the early customers and sell your solution without a product?
    1. Aditya: Founder-led sales is the answer. Find someone who has a burning pain point and is willing to invest in you to solve this problem. They will request for extra features but if you find early ICPs who will take risks with you. They interviewed a happy customer and published an article called “Gong vs Avoma” on a third party provider with subtle branding in place.
    2. Swapnil: Find the customers through your network, your investors, advisors etc. Look for partners who don't have a solution in place and offer ‘aha!’ moments periodically even with an incomplete product. Sell your customers like you sold to VCs.
    3. Nickhil: Share a brochure with customers that captures what your product will look like - all specs, features etc. If the best case gets a good response, offer working on it together. Find champions in the senior most member of the team and the working customer.
    4. Ravi: If you started off as a service, find your best customers who would help you productize. Even if potential customers are not looking to buy your product, sit down with them and ask “what will make you a hero at your organization?”. Ask them to open up their network with you - slack channels, dinners and more. For enterprise, you can take as long as 2 years but establish the relationship and promise an innovative journey.
    5. Hemant: You are not selling a product or service, you are selling your customer a promotion! Show them the value you are offering for them.
  3. Qualifying: what was the feedback mechanism like?
    1. Aditya: Consider disqualifying customers. Understand how frequent is the problem, how much are you willing to pay and does your job depend on it? For e.g. an engineer might hate taking notes but sales people cannot relive a customer call. If a customer uses your product daily, weekly or so - they are the right customers for you. They even blocked people from signing up from a personal email, focusing on a smaller set with a burning need.
    2. Swapnil: Figure out a few set requirements by making sure a lot of your partners have overlapping needs. Eliminate all the rest, focus on a specific ICP and make hard decisions of off-boarding customers who don't make sense for you. Approach them in a they can't say no to working with you - offer them an angel investor position etc. A cheaper product might raise suspicions - lower prices are not a feature. You can try to create FOMO by putting others on wait-list and letting your customers know they are getting the special treatment.
    3. Nickhil: Charge the right amount that your customers take you seriously. YOU must make an effort to maintain the relationship. Early customers might get massive discounts but also ask for a longer association. In software, prices only go down never up - figure out pricing on the fly but test the limit!
    4. Ravi: Say NO to people who don't fit your customers, who will not be able to pay you. Have the conversation about pricing and payment schedule depending on their budget and roadmap.
  4. Maximizing impact
    1. Swapnil: Do press releases, be in the public eye. Go deeper, go faster - if you can do so much in 6 months, imagine how much you can do within a year! Remove roadblocks by staying in touch with the most important, senior stakeholders.
    2. Aditya: ****Keep updating, iterating and shipping faster for your early customers. This would kickstart a good word-of-mouth campaign. However it is a balance between building for all customer needs vs only the most relevant ones. Leverage them to scale and build faster.
    3. Nickhil: White papers, journal papers are more detailed and taken more seriously. Press releases with quotes from the customers are well received.
    4. Ravi: Customers case studies offer insight to future customers understand the value proposition and relationship you have with your customers. Forester reports seemed better than Gartner because it was more quantitative and can be used by your customers to present the value offered to them. Also offer to help them with their reports. Consider doing workshops with customers and allow them to draft the agenda. Aggregate and anonymize the data when publishing reports.
  5. “Aha” moments!
    1. Aditya: Meeting customer in-person offers more insight and helps build relationship. Give special treatment and go deep on understanding their needs.
    2. Swapnil: Keep measuring your “Aha” moment through NPS (lagging indicator). You can use them to boost employee moment. E.g. a customer used their dashboard during an important board meeting.
    3. Nickhil: Customers will help validate and shape your value prop for a particular use-case - figure out your business models. Figure out what is their “Aha” moment and what are they excited about. Check out his product here.
    4. Ravi: Keep testing whether or not you are solving a serious pain point. Figure out if there's a missing feature, common use case, common industry. See if you replace not just one but multiple vendors.
  6. Early GTM strategies
    1. Aditya: There was a mix of PLG and SLG depending on the customer. Product-led-sales is the new motion that combines the best of the two aforementioned strategies. PLG motion can help with adoption but doing SLG helps understand their needs. Do it thoughtfully in terms of unit economics.
    2. Swapnil: Think about the top channels that will help you drive long term growth, for e.g. content marketing. Founder should be at the forefront of sales and don't look to replace yourself with a VP of Sales early on. Start small with hiring AEs and then slowly and carefully build a team around them. Growing to a larger ARR you need to work multiple channels like outbound sales to fallback on. Plan ahead for the upcoming 12-24 months.
    3. Nickhil: Always be on the lookout for unconventional or traditional channels. Follow your customers and find out where they spend their time and establish those channels.
    4. Ravi: Experiment and figure out what works for you instead of blindly following the trend. You can have one straight, e.g. direct sales, but link them with multiple channels - partnerships, vendors etc.

Sales Masterclass for Founders

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