On Communication

XLIII

2024.04.21

Meeting people where they’re at when you’re talking to them is an exercise of empathy and one of the highest forms of art.

Engagement

I love conversations in which I learn from the other person. To learn from the other person, it helps if they are actively engaged. How do you have an engaged conversation with someone?

The obvious way to do this is for you to ask questions, which I’m pretty damn good at. As someone who finds himself described as “coy” maybe too often, though, I’m making an effort to also start being more open and discussing what I do in addition to exploring what the other person does.

One thing I’m trying to get more comfortable talking about is Ultima, but I’m running into an interesting problem. Since I spend so much of my time selling Ultima to users and potential customers and have a strong feedback loop when I do that, I tend to bias towards talking about it as if I were selling the software. 

So, now that I’m trying to make somewhat of an effort to actually discuss what I do if someone seems genuinely curious, I tend to default to saying what I shout at sales people over the phone to get them excited about the product.

That’s not to say that if a barista asks me what I do I try to sell them my software, but it is to say that a couple of times, I’ve gotten dangerously close. And, of course, you’re more than likely not going to have an engaging conversation with a girl at Starbucks if you’re yelling about the death of mass outbound email and the inability to commoditize true, quality outreach.

The easy answer there is that pitching your B2B SaaS is not how you flirt, but the more nuanced offshoot is that even among people who I could connect with in an engaging way by talking about Ultima, the things that they care about are not the same.

So, as an exercise, I’m going to explore how I might connect with a few different demographics about the same thing—Ultima.

Sales People

Sales people are the easiest group to talk about Ultima with, probably because I have spent the most time interfacing with them directly. For them, they care about the features of the product that prevent them from having to do manual work, particularly a few annoying steps, as well as the chance that the product will increase their Key Performance Indicators (KPI)–response rate, meeting set rate, sales qualification rate, and possibly closing rate. 

They care about the fact that instead of having a spreadsheet with a bunch of rows representing barely any relevant information on a company, or an utterly incomplete CRM, they get all of the information they need to immediately send out their first message to their potential client. That includes particular data points that they’ve indicated they like or want to see that maybe aren’t so easy to find.

Ultima Mercury is easy to use and helps them sell—what a terrifically straight forward pitch. 

Sales Leaders

At the start of our deep dive into sales, I made the mistake of pitching sales leaders the same way that I was pitching the sales people. Jack called me out on this and I course corrected. 

Some of the pitch is the same, such as focusing on the KPI improvement. For the sales leaders, though, they care that Ultima Mercury will be a tool their sales people will actually use, which is why it’s so important to show them that a high value email can be sent with one button. 

Something else that the sales managers care about but the sales people don’t always have their eyes on as much is going “upstream” from a contract value size–there seems to be an issue where sales people don’t focus on the total contract value of the sale as much as sales leaders would like, and might get too focused on trying to close a bunch of $10,000 contracts when they could be closing a handful of $100,000 contracts. 

So, that’s part of the pitch to the sales leaders: we’ll help your sales people go up stream and focus on bigger deals. 

Entrepreneurs and Investors

Now this is where there’s a pretty big divergence in messaging that was a little bit more natural to me but still warranted care. To entrepreneurs and investors, the thing that tends to be the most interesting is that we started selling the product before it was technically complete. 

We effectively started by delivering different services completely manually and figuring out what seemed to be the most high value by user engagement, results, responsiveness during sales/discovery calls, and, ultimately, willingness to pay. 

The degree to which we started systematizing and automating the process was correlated to the confidence we had in the service providing value to the users. 

Of course, outside of this, they ask questions about the team, time allocation, pricing model, customer acquisition strategy, and goals.

Technical People

Another big divergence–while we are blessed to have found an intern for the summer who asked a ton of questions about how the product we are building actually fits into a user’s workflow, that is not always the most interesting thing to technical people. 

This is much more diverse than any of the above ones, as “technical” is a big, nebulous term. Here, though, I think we’ll use it less loosely as software engineers or people who have invested time in understanding computation in general. 

For these individuals, talking about robustly scraping the internet, LLM agents, domain discovery, graph completion, link prediction, and other interesting technical processes that we have implemented or are on the path to implement may become a little bit more engaging. 

And, given that for me, the point of having an engaging conversation is somewhere between learning and having fun, of the four domains that I I’ve discussed and have a million things to learn in, this is definitely the one in which I stand to learn the most in any given conversation.

Same Question, Different Answers

To bring our course in Ultima Communications to a close, we’ll show how the same question might really be a different question for all four of the above demographics. If it’s a different question, it warrants a different answer to foster maximum connection.

Pop Quiz: What do you do if someone asks you, “How is Ultima Mercury different from {InsertOtherGenericSalesTool}?” Queue Jeopardy Music. 

Based on the above reflections, we’ll go demographic by demographic and attempt to identify both what the intention of the question is and what an appropriate answer might be:

Sales Person: 

• Real Question: Why should I spend time getting a login to a new platform when I’ve already tried 10 other tools?

• Real Answer: We don’t sell you a spreadsheet with a couple phone numbers on it… we’re locating the companies that are actually facing the problems you solve and giving you everything you need so you can press one button and have your first bit of highly personalized outreach in their inbox.

Sales Leader:

• Question: Is this a commodity? If so, I will shop on price.

• Real Answer: The other tools on the market serve a purpose, but truly have a lot of room for error on the user’s part and take time to get right that your sales people could otherwise be spending selling. Our clients think of what we do more of as a service than a product; our weekly output is flexible to feedback and adjusts to make sure your team has everything they need to produce results. 

Entrepreneurs and Investors:

• Question: Does the product have a moat/edge or will someone be able to copy it in two weeks?

• Real Answer: We haven’t seen someone executing with this level of quality or focus on service yet. While we’re not sure someone can’t enter the market and do the same, we know that there’s a pressure not to and feel confident that we have enough time to onboard enough sales team to systematically collect the data we need to make the product impossible to replace in their workflows.

Technical Person:

• Question: Are you working on anything technically novel or exciting here or is this just something any shill on the internet can sell?

• Real Answer: We ship code fast and are finally getting into the more exciting technical challenges like building LLM agents. We also have a {InsertTechnicalScheme} in the pipeline that we haven’t seen anyone else in the space work on yet and really think will give us a longer term moat. 

Imperfections

My demographic stereotyping here is incomplete and makes quite a few assumptions. Sometimes, Entrepreneurs are Sales Leaders and sometimes (although very rarely) Sales People are Technical People. 

To have people engage with you, you need to engage with them. It helps if you can meet them where they’re at. You learn more by asking a sales leader about what challenges he’s facing with existing sales tools than you will by asking him the run time of his LLM Agent. 

Meet people where they are. Find what engages them.

Of course, you also don’t need to talk about business at all. But, since I’m trying to be less coy about it, I might as well do it right.

Of all the things that you care about, what might most excite and engage the person on the other end of your conversation?

Live Deeply,